A blog sharing information about materials presented to children on climate, highlighting those intended to frighten or mislead, and those which seek to inform and inspire rather than to recruit, even the very young, for an ill-founded political campaign around the threat of CAGW. A campaign which is irresponsible, destructive, divisive, and degrading.

These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy.Pascal Bruckner (http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_apocalyptic-daze.html)

Monday, 4 October 2010

10-minute trainer: Hansen's sea-level daydream vs some data

Japanese quality specialists in industry developed the idea of a '10-minute trainer', by which an instructor or a supervisor would have materials ready to take advantage of any downtime in a process to do some teaching about statistical and other insights or techniques relevant to process improvement. The idea is to be ready to take advantage of an unscheduled opportunity to do some teaching. Now in a school of course, teaching is the main process, but sometimes there can be opportunities to go outside of the curriculum. Perhaps this might apply for the senior years in High School, whenever pupils or teachers have the luxury of being able to spend such time. I am taking it as read that the curriculum itself is likely to include considerable misinformation about climate, and so these '10-minute trainers' would only be for those willing to be a little radical. The '10-minutes' is not meant to be taken literally, but rather just to convey a modest amount of time, available with little or no warning. And perhaps somewhere there are, or will be, examination boards and curricula that would not penalise pupils taking science and data seriously, rather than merely parroting pressure group nonsense and associated political 'correctness'.

We could readily build a set of them for teachers willing to engage classes on the realities of climate and/or of pressure groups and their mentors. The recent splattergate movie from 10:10 is a reminder of how zealotry, and the ignoring of real data, can so easily lead to ruthless fanaticism. Using simple data sets can be enough to expose, bit by bit, step by step, the emptiness of the fanatics' approach, and at the same time encourage youngsters to discuss, differ, and think for themselves in a civilised manner.

(1) The predictions (source:http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html) :
'While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." '(2) The data (source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/50yr.shtml?stnid=8518750&name=The+Battery&state=New+York): a scatterplot of the rate of sea-level rise (in mm per year) against CO2 concentration

And of course, now in 2010, 22 years after Hansen's casual (and causal) talk of sea-level rises bringing flooding to New York in 20 years thanks to the 'greenhouse effect' [of CO2], we can easily confirm that it has not yet happened - the West Side Highway is not under water due to higher sea-levels.

Now class, what can we learn from this? What other data from New York or elsewhere do you think would be helpful to improve our discussion of these predictions? How far would you be willing to extrapolate from a such a scatterplot using higher levels of CO2? Do you think CO2 levels could ever be a reliable predictor of sea level changes? What would a naive extrapolation of the plot predict for the rate of sea level rise today given that CO2 levels have risen further over the past few years? What relevance would rainfall levels or storms have to our discussion? And so on.

1 comment:

The entire Global Warming hype is based on temperature readings from badly sited thermometers. The latest post from Jo Nova includes many pictures from Anthony Watts "Surface Stations" project, and is the easiest way I can think of to show how we are all being duped.

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About Me

I spent 25 years in statistical consultancy for industry. Before that I worked as a physicist in nuclear fuel research for three years, as a schoolteacher for one year, and as a meteorologist for four years. I also worked for six months or so as a research officer for the World Development Movement, on the council of which I served for a few years in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, I spent 3 years trying to set up an environmental consultancy specialising in air pollution. Something of a wandering, if not lost, soul until applied statistics caught my interest in the early 80s, first of all in connection with air pollution, and later in connection with understanding and improving industrial processes. I have degrees in physics, atmospheric physics, and applied statistics.